which I recognized as an old acquaintance, was beside it, but the owner was
absent.

I sat down, resolved to wait patiently for her coming, without any
announcement of my being there. I was not sorry, indeed, to have some
moments to collect my thoughts, and restore my erring faculties to
something like order.

As I looked about the room, it seemed as if I had been there but yesterday.
The folding-doors lay open to the garden, just as I had seen them last; and
save that the flowers seemed fewer, and those which remained of a darker
and more sombre tint, all seemed unchanged. There lay the guitar to whose
thrilling chords my heart had bounded; there, the drawing over which I had
bent in admiring pleasure, suggesting some tints of light or shadow, as the
fairy fingers traced them; every chair was known to me, and I greeted them
as things I cared for.

While thus I scanned each object around me, I was struck by a little china
vase which, unlike its other brethren, contained a bouquet of dead and
faded flowers; the blood rushed to my cheek; I started up; it was one I had
myself presented to her the day before we parted. It was in that same vase
I placed it; the very table, too, stood in the same position beside that
narrow window. What a rush of thoughts came pouring on me! And oh!--shall I
confess it?--how deeply did such a mute testimony of remembrance speak
to my heart, at the moment that I felt myself unloved and uncared for by
another! I walked hurriedly up and down, a maze of conflicting resolves
combating in my mind, while one thought ever recurred: "Would that I had
not come there!" and yet after all it may mean nothing; some piece of
passing coquetry which she will be the very first to laugh at. I remembered
how she spoke of poor Howard; what folly to take it otherwise! "Be it so,
then," said I, half aloud; "and now for my part of the game;" and with this
I took from my pocket the light-blue scarf she had given me the morning we
parted, and throwing it over my shoulder, prepared to perform my part in
what I had fully persuaded myself to be a comedy. The time, however, passed
on, and she came not; a thousand high-flown Portuguese phrases had time to
be conned over again and again by me, and I had abundant leisure to enact
my coming part; but still the curtain did not rise. As the day was wearing,
I resolved at last to write a few lines, expressive of my regret at not
meeting her, and promising myself an early oppor